In A.D. 751, not quite thirty years after the Prophet Muhammad had made his epochal flight, or hijrah, from Mecca to Medina, and less than twenty years after his death, the conquering Muslim armies in the East defeated the Chinese governor Kao Sien-chih with his Turkish troops at Talas, in what is now Kazakhstan. The victory was momentous not only because it checked Chinese expansion in Central Asia but also because the spoils of war included Chinese paper-makers. As the great Islamicist and historian S. D. Goitein used to remark, “The Arabs learned how to make paper from the Chinese, and they haven’t stopped covering it since.” This jocular remark is an understatement; the profusion and variety of Arabic literature are mind-boggling. The standard history by the German scholar Carl Brockelmann (known to his colleagues as der Zettelpascha or “the index-card Pasha,” because of his brimming files) consists of five massive volumes of exceedingly fine type; this is now being supplemented by the continuing history (it has reached ten volumes, with more to come) of the Turkish historian Fuat Sezgin.

Classical Arabic literature is a learned literature, in this similar to such traditions as the Sanskrit or the Hebrew; it was not uncommon for an adîb, or litterateur, to master several disciplines and to write authoritative treatises in each. In addition to such displays of erudition it went without saying that a scribe or scholar, a kâtib or an ‘âlim, would not only have hundreds